Bug 141929 - Improve Help information for Calc's CONVERT funtion
Summary: Improve Help information for Calc's CONVERT funtion
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Documentation (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Rafael Lima
URL:
Whiteboard: target:7.2.0
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: HelpGaps-NewFeatures
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2021-04-27 10:05 UTC by Steve Fanning
Modified: 2021-06-16 16:31 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Steve Fanning 2021-04-27 10:05:30 UTC
Description:
Work on the Calc Functions wiki has collated a detailed description of this wide-ranging function and it would be beneficial to include some of this information in the help page. See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Calc_Functions/CONVERT.

The following areas should be reviewed with the objective of improving the user help:
(i) the unit symbols in the help page do not have names and it is not obvious what some of them represent (this is detailed on the wiki)
(ii) the examples in the wiki are more varied and could be added to the Help page.
(iii) the list of unit symbols in the help is not complete.

However, care should be taken that the help page does not get overly detailed.

The help topic for Calc's CONVERT function is contained in file reference ...text/scalc/01/04060116.xhp

Actual Results:
Not applicable

Expected Results:
Not applicable


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No



Additional Info:
Not applicable
Comment 1 Rafael Lima 2021-04-27 14:23:07 UTC
Hi Steve, thanks for reporting this issue.

After taking a closer look at the Help file for CONVERT (link below), I believe there's a lot of room for improvement.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060116.html?DbPAR=CALC#bm_id3148446

For instance, the table with unit symbols could be replaced by the tables in the wiki containing the actual names of all measurement units.

A few more examples could be added to the Help, specially those using prefixes.

Also, the binary prefixes in the Help should be displayed as tables.

My only concern is that, if we implement all of this, the CONVERT section in this help page will be much longer that all the other functions combined. Keep in mind that this help page also covers other functions as well.

To overcome this issue, my suggestion is to create a separate help page for CONVERT, as is the case for many other functions as IMCOSH, IMCOT, etc. All of them are listed in 04060116.xhp but have their own help pages.

By creating a new help page for CONVERT, we will have more freedom to add all the relevant info.
Comment 2 Steve Fanning 2021-04-28 09:16:21 UTC
I would support your idea of moving the CONVERT function's description onto a separate help page, making it easier to improve the topic by adding additional information. However, I would check with Olivier that this won't cause too much disruption before proceeding.
Comment 3 Rafael Lima 2021-04-28 14:04:10 UTC
(In reply to Steve Fanning from comment #2)
> I would support your idea of moving the CONVERT function's description onto
> a separate help page, making it easier to improve the topic by adding
> additional information. However, I would check with Olivier that this won't
> cause too much disruption before proceeding.

@olivier could you please give your input on this issue?

In short, we would like to move the Convert function to a separate help file, which is what's done for other functions in the text/scalc/01/04060116.xhp file.
Comment 4 Commit Notification 2021-05-20 23:12:41 UTC
Rafael Lima committed a patch related to this issue.
It has been pushed to "master":

https://git.libreoffice.org/help/commit/774b852c14a4a8df49c9ad35e609d8060b9b46a1

tdf#141929 Improve CONVERT help and move to a separate file